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Published in the Sonora Review 49, 2005
“Please! Hold Your Applause Until We Know The Diver Is Alll Riiight!!” The voice is loud, mechanical, and very grave. I hear it twice a day, four times on the weekends, as I’m standing with the other sweepers and janitors at the back of the big stadium, behind the metal bars that surround the bleachers. I hear the voice, and I always believe it. We all, sweepers, janitors, the guy in the cart behind us selling popcorn and his line of customers, and the dozens or hundreds of people sitting on the rows and columns of wooden bleachers, we all hold our breath and wait and wait. We look down at the small and what must be hazardously shallow light blue water, the dolphin tank that is used just now, at the end of the show, as the high dive pool. We don’t breathe and we look and try to see if the diver is alll riiight. But we can’t tell if he is, under the clear water. We can’t see if he’s moving or if he’s squished with his neck broken. We don’t know. We wait. And there he is! His head and then quickly his shoulders and even his torso soar up out of the water, his right arm raised high above his head, a beauty pageant smile on his tanned face—yes! The diver is all right! But I knew he would be. He is, every day, two or four times a day, he’s always all right. I know he’s just staying under the water to fool the crowd. I know the voice over the loud speaker is just that obnoxious guy who sometimes orders hamburgers and fries from the employee window and sits at the break table and smirks over at us, a bunch of teenagers in yellow and blue uniforms, dirt and gum and worse stuck to our clothes and arms and hair because we’ve been out sweeping and picking up cigarette butts and installing fresh rolls of toilet paper in the rest rooms all over the park all day long. But still. Every time I hear that guy’s voice coming from those big speakers, a voice so large and insistent that it makes me believe his words—and every time I see the world champion diver that they’ve rented, along with the rest of his team, to swim around the dolphin tank and dress up like a clown and then climb to the high high board way up over the building, way up over the tree tops, climbing in segments, stopping every five or seven steps to shake out his left leg, then stepping some more and shaking out his right leg, which makes us believe that he’s trying to avoid the inevitable, procrastinating, that he doesn’t really want to go up so high and dive down so fast—every single time I hear the one guy’s voice and see the other guy’s arm coming up out of the water and his face smiling: every time I’m relieved, even proud, glad, and maybe even a little disappointed, that the diver is all right. And I’m always surprised. Every time, I get sucked into the illusion. * * * One day I was sitting in my English class when the kid from the office came in with a pink slip, not a yellow counselor slip, but a pink go-to-the-principal slip, which we didn’t get much of, actually not ever that I could remember, here in this advanced, college prep, etc. English class. The teacher smirked his usual smirk and handed it to me and said, “It says ‘immediately,’ so go ahead now.” Of course they all, the teacher, the students, wanted to know what it was for. And so did I. I had no idea. I had to wait outside on a chair when I got there because the assistant principal was currently occupied yelling at someone else. So I just sat there and thought how dumb the guy would feel when he found out he’d called in the wrong person, me, for whatever his problem was. But then I also felt a little nervous because what if I was about to get in trouble? My turn came and I went and sat on the small chair facing the guy’s big desk. I’d never seen him before in my life. “Debra,” he called me, of course, “What do you have to say for yourself?” he asked. He was pretty young and all fresh-faced. Brown hair, blue tie, wire-rimmed glasses. He looked right at me. “I don’t know,” I said. Was I supposed to call him Sir? “You don’t know?” he said, very sarcastically. “No,” I said. He just stared at me, scrunching his eyes up a little. This was even more pointless than I’d imagined. “You don’t have anything to say about this?” he said and slid a sheet of notebook paper across the table at me. Oh, that, I thought; wow. I’d been sick two days before, actually sick and lying on the couch watching soap operas and game shows, but I’d forgotten to get a note from my mom and I was seventeen years old and it didn’t seem like that big of a deal one way or the other. So, in order to be allowed into all the classes I went to every day anyway, I needed a note and then I had to stand at the line at the Readmit Office window to get the small form that all my teachers would then initial when I handed it to them, except my sixth period teacher who would just throw it away at the end of the day. So my friends and I were all sitting out on the grass in the amphitheater
before the first bell rang that day I came back from being sick and I
said, “Shit. I forgot to get a note.” And so Pam said she’d
just forge one for me. She took the piece of notebook paper I handed her
and wrote, “Please excuse Debra Davis from school yesterday. She
was at home ill. Earnest Davis.” It looked authentic enough, like
a parent’s writing, though it looked nothing like my parents’
writing. Only problem was, she’d spelled my dad’s name, Ernest,
wrong. But they couldn’t possibly look those things up for a hundred
“Have you been in this office a lot?” he asked me. Now I was crying for real, but not sobbing. “No.” I said. “Never before.” “Never before, huh? You seem pretty upset for ‘never before.’ This is only my second week here at this school, but I bet if I went out there and checked your file, I’d find you’ve been in here ‘a lot’ before,” he said. Now I was mad, and not scared any more, but I was still crying. Except now I was crying because he was so stupid not because he was mean. He left the room. He was gone for longer than I would think it would take to find a file. Maybe mine was buried away somewhere. Why exactly was he treating me like this? Like I was some kind of criminal. He wasn’t just mad about the note; he was mad about all the other stuff he’d imagined I’d already done and already gotten in trouble for. Or maybe he was mad that I was lying to him which of course I wasn’t even. He came back in. “You’re right,” he said. Was he sorry now? “You haven’t been in here before.” Like that was news to me. He shifted his personality a little, now to being confused. “What did your dad say to you last night? ”My dad? “Nothing,” I said .“Nothing?” he said. Now he was back to being sarcastic. “It says here someone from this office talked to your dad at work yesterday. He didn’t say anything about that last night at dinner?” He thought I was lying again which I wasn’t and actually he was only pretending to be mad at me. He liked to think he had power over me. And to think that I thought he had power. I just shook my head, no, nothing. He gave me a warning and let me go. But I know he was still confused when I left. He thought the only reason a person would cry in his office was because she was afraid of getting in big trouble from him, that he was some kind of giant force and so I must be a terrified speck. But when it turned out that that wasn’t the case, he didn’t bother to ask for the real reason I was crying. I think I was crying because he was imagining all these things about me without ever asking me about me. It was like I was only important to talk to if I’d done something really wrong. Otherwise, I didn’t matter. It wasn’t that I thought he was wrong to call me in and ask me about what I’d done. The school had rules, and it was his job to enforce them. I didn’t have a problem with the fact that there were rules. And it’s true that, while I didn’t break the you-have-to-attend-class rule, I did break the you-have-to-bring-a-note-actually-written-by-your-parents-when-you’re-sick rule. I was willing to take my punishment for that—though he didn’t even give me any. But I wondered why he had treated me the way he did. Why didn’t he even ask me why I was crying? Why did he assume so much about me—and try to find out, in the end, so little?
* * * Monday morning. I had set my alarm for 9:00. I sat up on the edge of my water bed and stared down at my clothes on the floor. I had to call him, I told myself. Larry said you can’t just wait for them to call you up; you have to call them yourself, show them you’re interested. And responsible. I drank some water and practiced what I would say, out loud to myself in the empty house. Should I change out of my nightgown? I dialed the number and asked to speak to the manager. It was him who answered; “Yess?” he said. “I, uh, wascallingtoseeifIgotthejob,” I said. “I’m Debbie. I came in last week.” “No,” he said. “We just hired someone else on Friday.” No, that couldn’t be. I had to have that job. “Okay,” I said. He hung up. I must have failed the test.
But now, this summer, Laura realized she was really in love with Luke. They had run away together and were in hiding, living at the Whittaker’s farm. Mrs. Whittaker wore a red and white checkered apron on every episode. Luke and Laura helped around the house. They worried about what people back in Port Charles thought about their disappearance because they were in love and happy but Laura was still married to Scottie. I didn’t understand how Laura could fall in love with a guy if he’d ripped off her clothes and made her have sex. I would never fall in love with someone who did that to me. Never. How could you like him then? But they seemed so happy there in their hay loft at the farm; Luke took care of Laura and told her she was beautiful. I knew this was just TV, but I thought that maybe that’s how real life was too and I just didn’t know it. Still, he made me nervous, Luke did. The store manager made me nervous, too, because he looked and kinda acted like Luke. He seemed to have something to hide, too. And some kind of power. Whenever I came into the tiny store, he didn’t look directly at me, but held his head to the side and grinned with half of his mouth. He seemed really bored to have to be selling watches. What would he rather be doing? But I couldn’t get a summer job anywhere else, so I applied at this place because there was a Help Wanted sign in the window which meant they had a job open for me, if I could just convince them to give it to me. And I had to get a job because my mom told me every day I had to get a job. It was supposed to help me learn some responsibility. After I had turned in the application form, the manager told me I’d have to come back for a lie detector test. So I went back again, even though I didn’t want to take the test at all. None of my other friends ever had to take a test like that to get their jobs, at McDonald’s and the shoe store; why would selling watches be different? On the morning when I went there for the test, he told me to go sit on a chair in the back room. I thought I would be hooked up to one of those machines with the wires on my head and needles scratching wavy lines on a long sheet of paper. But instead, I just sat on a three legged stool and he called some lie detector company on the phone. He handed the phone to me and went back to the front counter. The woman on the other end introduced herself and told me the name of the company she worked for. Then she explained the test. She would ask me a series of questions and I had to answer them truthfully. All they wanted to do was see if I was lying, so if I just answered everything truthfully I would pass the test, no matter what the answers were. I wondered how they could tell over the phone. Did they have the receiver hooked up to one of those machines with the paper and ink and wires? I didn’t want to not get the job, though, so I decided not to ask. I didn’t want to seem difficult. “What’s your name?” she asked. “Debbie Davis,” I said. “Have you ever lied before?” she asked me. Shit. But all I had to do was tell the truth. “Yes, a few times.” “When?” she asked. “Oh, I don’t know. A few times to my mom I guess.” Did she want the dates? “Have you ever stolen anything from a place you’ve worked at before?” She said each word the same way, like she was reading from a script. All evenly. “No. I’ve never had a job before.” “Have you ever taken any drugs?” This is what I was afraid of. I turned around so my back was to the door; could the manager hear me from the front counter? I hunched down and wrapped my fingers around the mouth piece. “Just a little,” I said. My voice was shaking, but I wasn’t lying. Could they tell the difference? “Have you ever smoked pot?” she asked in the even voice. “Yes,” I answered quickly. “How many times?” God, I don’t know how many times. How can I answer truthfully if I don’t even know? “Three or four times.” Did I sound like I was lying? “Have you ever used cocaine?” “No.” It was the truth, but I felt like crying. Was the pen making waves on the paper there on the other end of the phone? Luke’s face from the TV screen and the manager’s sly grin when he’d dialed the phone and the questioner’s monotone voice and her impolite questions were all I could see and hear. I hooked the low heels of my job interview shoes over the top rung of the wooden stool and I closed my eyes. It was like I was being molested, over the phone. But I had to do this to get a job. “Have you ever used heroin?” she asked from her list. “No.” My eyes were stinging. “Okay. That’s all,” she said in a normal human voice. “Will you put the manager back on now, please?” I pressed my fingers over my eyelids and tried to wipe the tears out without smearing my eyeliner. I took a deep breath. I set the receiver down on the stool and walked back to the front counter. “She wants to talk to you.” I smiled with my head almost down. He did the half grin again and went back to the phone. I stood behind the counter, where I would stand all day when I got the job. The lines of fluorescent bulbs in the glass display case shone up into my face. I squinted and looked down. One whole shelf was covered with Mickey Mouse watches. Another one had different digital watches, all of them black. Next to each watch was a tiny sign with the price typed on it. I wondered if I would be typing the prices, too, or just helping the customers. The manager came back and said, “Okay. That’s all for today. We have your application on file.” Then he sat back down on his stool behind the counter and opened a paperback. “Okay,” I said. I smiled at him even though he wasn’t looking at me. I walked outside as fast as I could. I didn’t pause to look at any of the clothes or shoes in the mall’s window displays. I got on my moped and pedaled it through the parking lot until the motor jerked and started. I was free .I held my arm straight out to signal a left turn, and I joined the mid-morning traffic. I felt embarrassed about the phone conversation, but I wasn’t sure what I was embarrassed about. About smoking pot once in a while? Or about having to answer those questions to a complete stranger, over the phone? The forty-mile-an-hour wind tangled the strands of my hair that weren’t hidden underneath my yellow helmet. The phone test had been terrible. But at least I had a job. I’d just have to call in so he could say, “You’re hired!” That Monday morning, I decided not to change out of my nightgown, after all; it’s not like he could see me through the phone. After I practiced a couple of times, I dialed the number printed on the red and white business card. “I, uh, wascallingtoseeif-Igotthejob,” I said. I had tried to sound relaxed and responsible; instead I sounded nervous and immature. But, of course, it didn’t really matter what I sounded like: “We just hired someone else on Friday,” he said. I must have failed the test. I’m such an idiot, I thought. I really bet they can’t do those kinds of tests over the phone. But why did I think they could? Because they’d said. The manager and the lady on the phone both told me, and so I believed them. I took the test, just like they said to, because I thought if I did what they told me to do, they’d give me the job. But I never thought of the possibility of them lying to me. Why would they lie to me? And why would I believe them? * * * My friend Gary and I and five of our friends wrote up an underground newspaper and got it printed at a real printer and went to the school in the middle of the night and stuffed copies of it in everybody’s locker. This was, in fact, a violation of an official school board policy that said that all material distributed on campus must be “submitted for approval” to school administrators before distribution. We knew this. The day after we stuffed our Observers in the lockers, the principal reminded the whole student body of this rule. (Dostoyevski, Nietzsche, Gaius Caligula, and Jacques Strappe had been our bylines, so he didn’t know who, specifically, to blame.) Gary and some of the others on the underground newspaper had decided that rule violated our first amendment rights. In fact, they’d originally gotten the idea to do the underground paper specifically to challenge that rule. They explained this to the rest of us at the first Observer meeting, held in Gary’s bedroom. We were all crammed in there, sitting on his bed and the floor, Gary holding court from his desk chair. They shouldn’t be allowed to silence us like this, he said. I thought it was probably true, that we should have freedom of speech, though I also figured that under the law kids had different rights than adults. They wouldn’t let us drink, right? Or vote. So how much would they actually let us speak, or print? The day after the principal invoked the “submitted for approval” rule, Gary looked up the number for the ACLU in the yellow pages, called them, and talked with one of the lawyers there. The lawyer said he was interested in the situation and asked if we could come in to talk with him about it. Gary and I took the day off from school (with real notes from our real parents duly filed in the office the next day) and went in to meet with him. The building was plain, ordinary-looking, I thought. The lawyer met us at the door. He was a tall and dark. He led us back to what seemed like a small office. He took out a yellow pad and asked us first to tell him about the newspaper, how we’d printed it, how we’d distributed it. Then he asked us some specific questions. I felt shy, because it seemed like such a big important deal, the ACLU and all; Gary did most of the answering. The lawyer looked at the copy of the newspaper we’d brought with us, but he seemed more interested in the outside things, like what the principal had said about stuff being “submitted for approval” and about whether we had handed it out on campus or off, than in what the articles were about. He was friendly but professional with us, which I liked; he knew we weren’t adults, but he treated us as if we were important citizens, with rights to protect. Before we left his office, he said he would come and talk to the school board at the meeting the next week. They were trying to do “prior restraint” on us, he said, and that was unconstitutional. My mom hated the fact that I was writing for this newspaper, not that she read any of the articles, and she especially hated the fact that we were causing trouble with the school administrators. “The teachers and the principal, they know better than you do!” she said and she told me I better not show up that night on the news when the TV crew came and filmed us pasting up our second issue. My dad secretly slipped me ten dollars, to help with printing costs. (Not that he read the articles, either.) The ACLU lawyer did come and talk to the school board. I could tell from the way they listened to him that the members of the board took him very seriously. He was a good speaker, too. They looked at him the whole time he was at the microphone, didn’t shuffle their papers around in front of them or anything. They had a few questions for him at the end, technical questions about his interpretation of the law. In the end, a compromise was hammered out amongst the adults; the board reviewed the policy the ACLU lawyer had objected to and amended it: We could write and distribute the newspaper without submitting it for approval to the principal ahead of time, but after it was distributed, the principal could “halt distribution” (though I’m not exactly sure how he would have done this—would he run around grabbing papers out of kids’ hands?) if the paper contained “unlawful material,” such as libelous or obscene material or stuff that would “incite students to commit unlawful acts.” After that, one local newspaper ran the headline, “Student newspaper wins a round,” and we had. I was amazed. We had challenged a rule; they had changed it. We were pip-squeaks, compared to all of them, but look what had happened. I never knew students could have that much influence on a school—or even any influence at all. Not everyone was a happy camper, though. Many members of the board, in their interviews later with the adult journalists from the local papers, made it clear that, actually, they didn’t agree with changing the rule, didn’t agree that the law should be the way it was, but that they had changed it because their lawyer had told them they should. Which just made us feel even more powerful. At the end of that school year, Gary was invited to an ACLU dinner at someone’s home. He invited me to come along. The house it was at was very big, and the living room had a piano in it and long windows so you could see the sunset. The big back yard, where the dinner was held, had all different kinds of exotic plants. After we all finished eating, there was an award ceremony and Gary won a “youth award,” which was a surprise to us. They gave him a certificate and two books. Everyone there clapped the loudest when his prize was announced. Most of the people there were pretty old, like fifty or sixty. They liked to talk to us and liked that we were there. They wanted to know all about the newspaper, not the articles but the legal arguments. About a month later, Gary and I went to see a movie at an old movie theater. The movie was Swedish and had subtitles. It was the story of a twelve-year-old boy who had a crush on another boy. There were a lot of scenes outdoors, camping and hiking around. The boy seemed shy, but also happy. At the end of the movie, the boys kissed each other, and I’d never seen anything like that in a movie before. I thought I shouldn’t like it, because wasn’t it wrong? But it didn’t bother me after all. The boys seemed too young to be in love, they were younger than me, but I thought maybe things were just different in Sweden. I didn’t know; I’d never been there. As we were leaving the theater, Gary and I saw two men who we knew from the ACLU party. We went over to say Hi, and they asked us if we wanted to go get a cup of coffee with them. Immediately I thought No because I didn’t drink coffee and I’d never done anything like that after a movie before and we didn’t know them very well, so what would we all talk about? But Gary said that sounded great, and I just smiled, so the four of us walked down the block a little and found this place that sold donuts. The old guys bought our coffee for us. Then the four of us sat in green bucket seats around this dirty white table. I watched one old guy than the other pucker up his lips and drink the hot coffee out of the little Styrofoam cups. Gary, of course, was good at talking, so I didn’t worry too much about starting the conversation myself. They asked what did we think of the movie, and I wasn’t sure what to say because I wasn’t all that sure what I thought, plus what would these old guys in polyester pants think of the boys kissing each other and all that? But they said they liked the movie. And then they kept talking to us. What did we think of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan? I didn’t know what I thought; where was Afghanistan? And the Freeze, what did we think of the Freeze? I didn’t talk very much that night. I didn’t know how to react, up close, to an adult who asked me my opinion, and waited for the answer. I wished I’d had some opinions (Gary had plenty). I thought maybe I’d start getting some. I guess I’d just never thought of it before, having a conversation like that. But I’d also never seen a Swedish movie before, or had coffee out of Styrofoam, or been asked by a grownup what I thought without it being a test or a trap. * * * “I’d like to read you a poem I wrote,” he said, this guy who was in our night class. Sally and I and this guy were sitting outside on the peeling-paint wooden picnic bench in front of the auditorium of the community college, where the three of us were taking the same creative writing course. Sally and I were actually still in high school and were by far the youngest people in the night class; this guy we were talking to was as old as maybe thirty or fifty. It was a little hard to tell with him, even harder than with most adults. “Let me see if I can find it in here somewhere,” he said. He was a skinny guy with dirty jeans. His name was Roberto and he always smiled and talked a lot in class. You didn’t always know what he was talking about, but he was never boring to listen to. Sometimes he and Susan—the fat lady with the greasy hair (we knew about her hair because we sat behind her; we could see the strands in their separate clumps)—would get into arguments or discussions about some famous poet or about how to write a certain thing. Roberto seemed like he must be at least sort of poor, because his clothes were old or dirty. But he always wore a long scarf around his neck, not a wool scarf but the kind that might have flowers on it, except this one didn’t have the flowers, just some bright colors, faded. One time the teacher of this class, who really liked Ezra Pound and was very nice but didn’t always explain the assignments very well, read the lyrics to that song “MacArthur Park” out loud to the class. He was giving an example of metaphor or maybe analogy, I’m not quite sure. (That’s what I mean by not explaining the assignment very well.) “Someone left the cake out in the rain,” he said and paused a little, looked up at all of us. “And. I. Don’t. Think. That. I. Can. Take. It.” He had to stop or else he might cry. “Cause. It. Took. So. Long. To. Bake. It. AndI’llneverhavethatrecipe aaaaagain, aAgain.” I felt embarrassed for him, because it was such a stupid song and he was taking it so seriously. But I felt something else, too: I felt honored. He was reading something to us that was very important to him and he read it with all his feelings showing. The teachers in our high school would never do that. But this night class seemed like a different world. Like maybe it was a little part of the adult world that we were allowed into, a part of the world where people would teach us (not preach to us) and talk to us (not at us) and trust us to understand when they read something important out loud to us. “OH! Good! Here it is,” Roberto said and pulled a crumpled sheet of paper out of his leather bag. Sally and I shifted a little on the bench, to get into a position for listening. “Round hipped, Double lipped,” he said. “Baby.” We nodded our heads. Yes. Or, I guess so. I didn’t know if that was good poetry or not. But I did know one thing: Roberto respected us. He’d offered something important to us, his poetry. It was a gift, and a gift couldn’t be bad or good; a gift was a gift, something extra, something new. I was being trusted with this gift. And I wanted to be able, some day, to give someone a gift like that myself.
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